About The Painting:Eclipse is centered around my dog Luna, who we brought with us to Berlin and a chaotic experience while being newly foreign.

She was heavily abused and starved before we adopted her, so she tended to have some behavioral issues. Regardless of her occasional misbehavior, my first puppy and I developed a quick attachment. One day, after recently having moved to Berlin, she became hostile and aggressively attacked my wife, biting her near the eye causing her face to swell. This led me to be concerned for future incidents and decide I likely didn't have the experience to train a dog with her behavioral needs. I cried while I brought her to Berlin's no kill animal shelter where she could perhaps find a more experienced owner. The background showing an eclipse like shape is actually the pattern from Luna's face. I felt an eclipse also related to how she tended to get between my wife and I. This is why the dog is literally moving between us, sad with her head down. The red mark on the large head of my wife was to emphasize the importance of her face in the story and the red shape to represent the startling moment that created the chaos. Me, the figure in blue, is represented twice; The chaotically painted, sad, empty figure and the falling outlined lost figure (this one can be hard to see in pictures), both representing different parts of my experience and struggle.

About The Painting:Paralyzing Gaze depicts the experience one has when a persons unflinching gaze causes an out of body hyper self-aware moment which feels entirely out of touch with objective reality.

About The Painting:Inner Battles is a symbolic portrait. The ideas stems around my wife curious personality, which clashes an intense creative need to express herself and her common wish to be a wall flower, almost entirely hidden in plain view.

Her face is painted in a way that it sits back with the background, where as her flat bright coat draws immense attention, relating her fashion sense, one of the many ways she chooses to express herself. Her face expresses something of a discomfort around the attention she has created for herself. Lastly the bottom has an unfinished quality, relating to her uncertainty whether to express herself or not.